Back to the NAM

Thomson had been bright and polite, as he usually was,
had invited Bohr to dinner at Trinity, but had failed
to show interest in his ideas.

The Physicists (draft of an uncompleted work)
C.P. Snow

This was the day of the tour of the Trinity Site. I was supposed to
join the tour in front of the National Atomic Museum at 5:30am or
5:45. My original plan had been to walk but the recent snow and
rain made a coward of me.

At 4:50, I called up the Albuquerque Cab Company, asked for a cap.
"We'll send one out there right away." I opened up my curtains
and looked outside at the dark parking lot. Someone was wandering
around down there. Now he was going into the hotel office. Weird.

I saw a taxicab go by on Central Avenue.
It was with the Yellow Cab Company.

I saw another taxicab go by on Central Avenue.
It was with the Yellow Cab Company.

At 5:20, I called up the Albuquerque Cab Company to ask where
my cab hat got to. The dispatcher said that she remembered me,
not to worry. I asked if the cab was likely to show up in time
to get me to the museum by 5:45. She said that the cab wasn't
likely to pick me up for another hour. I said not to bother to
send it, then. The dispatcher said that this was one of their
busiest times. I looked outside into the pre-dawn dark. "Uh-huh,"
I said. I hung up.

I wondered how I'd missed the implication of a 1.5 hour wait in
the sentence, "We'll send one out there right away."

I called up the Yellow Cab Company. I asked for a cab, nervously
asked the dispatcher if I could expect the cab soon. She said it
would be picking me up within 15 minutes. Actually, it was 10 minutes.

I alit from the cab in the parking lot of the museum as hundreds of
my fellow tourists looked on. They were stamping and shivering to
keep off the cold. I'd shown up about as late as I could without
being left behind. Soon the buses were loading.

Another Bus Ride

We must talk of our subject not as a community of specialized scientists but
as men concerned with understanding, through analogy, description, and an
act of confidence and trust, what other people have done and thought and
found. So men listen to accounts of soldiers returning from a campaign of
unparalleled hardship and heroism, or of explorers from the high Himalayas,
or of tales of deep illness, or of a mystic's communion with his God.

"A Science in Change," J. Robert Oppenheimer

I asked Joyce (her name turned out to be Joyce) if it was okay
if I sat next to her. She said yes.

She asked me if I was the guy who'd gotten out of the taxi.
I said yes. She said it had been a glamorous entrance, breezing
in at the last second. I 'fessed up about about the unintended
cause of my last-second arrival. If everyone else on the tour
had seen my "glamorous" entrance, my celeb reputation was secure; I
was safe in disillusioning one witness.

Joyce was easy to get along with, and no wonder-she was
from California, from Sacramento of all places.
Now she lived in Jemez Springs, NM,
but at least she'd been raised right.

We talked about the differences between Albuquerque and Sacramento.
The main thing she liked about Albuquerque was the lack of traffic
jams. Driving in Sacramento had turned into a nightmare over the
last few years. Albuquerque was much easier to get around--perhaps
because it was less crowded, perhaps because its growth was better
planned.

Joyce was able to find things to do in the area--she visited friends,
went dancing with her boyfriend, got out and about. I figured that
If she was used to Sacramento, maybe that would be enough.

At this point, our tour guide spoke up. His name was Gerry Taylor;
he'd done a lot of work at the Trinity site, helping to run cables
and assemble devices. Gerry had flown with the seventh, but I
didn't know exactly what that meant.

He told us about "Deak" Parsons, a major player in the development
of the atomic bomb. Parsons had also been involved in inventing
the device which, Taylor claimed, had won the war: the proximity
fuse. According to the book Target Hiroshima: Deak Parsons and
the Creation of the Atomic Bomb, by Maj. Albert B. Christman
(who, coincidentally, was on our bus), Parsons was the first
servicemember to recognize the military potential of RADAR.

That day, I heard from a few sources that RADAR and proximity fuses
had won the war.

Old MacDonald had a Ranch

We came to the MacDonald ranch, where engineers and techs had
assembled the Trinity gadget.

Joyce was glad for a chance to smoke.

There was a ramp which led up from the desert floor to
the floor of the house's front porch. Before letting us
in, a curator picked up a rock and used it to hammer some
nails into the porch until they were flush.

Photo: View of tourists from the clean room window

The techs had had a "clean" room--it was
still just a wood-walled room in a wooden house, but they'd
taped up the gaps around the windows to keep so much dust from
blowing in and had painted some graffiti above the door admonishing
enterers to wipe their feet.

Another room had a decoration on the walls, a stencil painted up
close to the ceiling. It was a sort of art deco pattern with
geometric shapes suggesting half-flowers and stems. Except, really,
the half-flowers looked like blasts on a horizon. (I'm giving
this textual description because my pictures didn't turn out.
This kills me. I don't see pictures of this pattern
anywhere. Couldn't just one camera-happy tourist have snapped a
picture of them, put that picture up on the web, and used
captioned it with some searchable phrase?) [Update: Alert reader
Mark Krohn pointed me
at a
picture of the stencil!]

Soon we were back in the bus, on our way to the site of the
Trinity blast.

Parking Lot

Marking the parking lot was "Jumbo," a huge thick hollow metal cylinder,
which looked the worse for wear. It dated from the Trinity experiment.
Originally, the Trinity gadget was to have been exploded inside Jumbo.

Take a missile test range, civilian and military airports,
antiaircraft weapon training and testing, target aircraft
from RCATs to B-29s, supermarket openings with war-surplus
searchlights, and Tequila so cheap you got a bottle and
change from an American quarter, and there were lots of
things to see.

Plutonium was very precious at the time. There was a good deal of
uncertainty as to whether this model of atomic bomb would work, uncertainty
about how well it would work. (That's why it was tested. There was
another type of bomb which was much more likely to work. It was
used--without a test--on Hiroshima.) The idea was: if the bomb didn't
explode very hard, then Jumbo would contain the explosion--and retain
the precious plutonium.

Jumbo was constructed far away and was transported to the site by
barge, rail, and a special truck. The truck had 64 tires. Maybe
"truck" isn't the word I want. Anyhow.

By the time Jumbo had been created and transported, scientists had
a better idea of what the Trinity gadget was likely to do. It wasn't
very likely to be a dud which Jumbo could contain. It was probably
going to vaporize Jumbo. If the gadget was a dud, it would probably
still have enough force to lodge plutonium into Jumbo's walls and
explode those walls outward--flinging huge pieces of radioactive
shrapnel great distances. They decided not to use Jumbo.

After the Trinity test, General Leslie Groves (military head of the
project) ordered Jumbo buried. Groves knew a lot about handling
investigations. He knew that if the senate decided to investigate
the Manhattan Project's finances, they'd be curious about this
$12 million lump of metal which was never used.

Later on, still nervous, he ordered a strange demolitions test.
He ordered Jumbo dug up. Large explosive charges were put inside.
They were supposed to blow Jumbo into bits, perhaps to remove some
embarassing evidence. However, the charges
weren't put in the correct places and instead Jumbo's lid was
blown off. Now it lies in the parking lot, a monument to...
to rapid obsolescence or something.

The Little Carts

Joyce hadn't stuck around to learn about Jumbo. She'd
gone over to look at the little electric carts. There were various
military folks sitting on little carts. Joyce asked what
they were for.

It was a half-mile walk to the blast site. The little carts were
meant for visitors who might have trouble walking a half-mile.
There were a lot of little carts, but not that many visitors.
There would be more later.

Perhaps he was bored without any passengers. The driver offered
Joyce a ride. She clambered into the little cart and reclined in
back like a movie star, letting the wind blow her hair as she was
driven off.

Meanwhile, back in the parking lot, I looked over the purveyors of
foodstuffs, t-shirts, coffee mugs, books, and postcards. They didn't
slow me down for long.

Soon I started the walk towards the blast site, the ultimate
goal of my pilgrimage. Nobody offerred me a ride.

I was walking behind a couple of ladies,
one of whom wasn't so mobile.
A soldier came towards us, steering a little cart. She asked
the not-so-mobile lady if she wanted a ride. The not-so-mobile
lady apparently didn't hear so well, because she kept walking
without acknowledging the question. The little cart had come even
with the n.s.m. lady; the soldier wanted to repeat the question; but
if she kept driving, the little cart would get further away and she
would be harder to hear; but she didn't want to stop the little cart.
Instead, she steered the little cart so that it began a sort of orbit
around the n.s.m. lady; the soldier faced the lady to better
project her voice and repeated her question.

It was a complicated operation. Really, I don't want to fault
the soldier for not realizing that her orbiting course had
sent her card trundling towards me. (I was walking
behind the n.s.m. lady, you will recall.) She was facing her
potential customer and thus it's natural that she didn't see me.

Still, I'm glad that no-one laughed at me as I started hopping
to keep from being run down by that little cart. It nearly
rendered me not-so-mobile.